Textbook Publishers Venture Into Staff-Development Frontier

Educators across the country will soon have access to a program
designed by some top reading experts that will help them refine their
teaching strategies.

But those experts aren't employed by colleges, universities, or
nonprofit education groups—the leading sources of professional
development for teachers. They work for Scholastic Inc., one of the
nation's biggest publishers of children's books and educational
materials.

"This is a very natural step for us to take to support teachers,"
said Margery Mayer, the president of Scholastic Education, the division
of the New York City-based publisher that set up the reading
professional-development program. "We believe teachers are yearning for
this help."

Scholastic is the latest publisher to enter the
professional-development market, further expanding publishers'
traditional role of producing a textbook and teachers' manual, and
offering a day or two of sessions to introduce teachers to the new
materials.

Publishers are expanding their products and services to include
online teacher support, tests aligned to textbook content, and other
supplementary products. Most of their activity, however, is in the
world of professional development, in which publishers are aggressively
touting new products such as Scholastic Red, acquiring smaller
companies that have established professional-development businesses,
and investing in start-ups that show potential for growth.

In addition to Scholastic, other major publishers—including
Pearson PLC, the McGraw-Hill Cos., and the Houghton Mifflin
Co.—have formed new divisions in the past 1½ years
dedicated specifically to contracting with states and school districts
to provide professional development.

"Now, we're being partners with the teachers through the
implementation process," said Maureen DiMarco, the vice president of
educational and governmental affairs for Houghton Mifflin, which is
based in Boston. "It's not just doing a couple days before school
starts and saying, 'God bless.'"

Standards-Driven

The trend is driven by the newfound awareness that teachers'
knowledge and skills will need to improve if their students are to
achieve to the standards set in states' accountability systems,
textbook publishers say. The need to enhance teachers' skills has led
to the availability of money for that purpose from state and local
governments, as well as pressure on publishers to prove that their
materials will yield higher test scores.

"What the school districts are saying is, 'We're engaged in trying
to meet these standards, and we need your help,'" said Peter
Jovanovich, the president of Pearson Education, a division of the
London-based publisher. "Without the standards movement, we wouldn't be
seeing as much activity."

States are also demanding that the publishers do more for them, Ms.
DiMarco added.

California is spending $31 million in the current fiscal year on
professional development that must be tied to the materials on the
state's list of approved reading and mathematics programs. Next year,
Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, has proposed $110 million for the
program.

Experts question, however, whether publishers are the best
instructional sources for school teachers.

In Florida and California, the publishers will be offering sessions
explaining the optimal way to use their materials. That kind of
professional development can be ineffective, according to one reading
expert, because it focuses on the content of the products, not
instructional strategies that might help teachers improve.

"Publishers don't have an incentive" to improve overall teacher
practice, said Richard Allington, a reading researcher at the
University of Florida in Gainesville, "because then [teachers] won't be
dependent on their products. That has nothing to do with improving
reading instruction or reading achievement."

Even if the publishers offer general rather than program-specific
training, they are unlikely to dedicate the time necessary to improve
teachers' skills, others say.

"The really substantive professional development has to take place
over a sustained period of time," said Thomas P. Carpenter, the
director of the National Center for Improving Student Learning and
Achievement in Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.
"Most textbook publishers are not prepared to do that level of
professional development."

Moreover, publishers' programs could be narrowly tailored for
specific subjects and goals, ignoring the broader needs of the school,
according to Dennis Sparks, the executive director of the Oxford, Ohio-
based National Staff Development Council.

"My largest concern is that they can pull staff development away
from the school," he said, "rather than focusing on the school's goals
for student learning."

New Approaches

To establish its new professional-development program—called
Scholastic Red—Scholastic hired an advisory board that included
Louisa C. Moats, a noted reading researcher, and Phyllis Hunter, a
national reading consultant.

The company piloted the project in some of the biggest districts in
the country, including Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Fairfax County, Va.
The New York City schools tested the program in the Chancellor's
District—the schools with the lowest test scores in the 1.1
million-student district.

Scholastic Red aims to help teachers find ways to improve their
practice using reading materials from any publisher. Scholastic
trainers work closely with facilitators who work for the district.
Those facilitators could be reading specialists, principals, or
curriculum directors, who are then responsible for working directly
with teachers.

The company also will operate a Web site, www.Scholasticred.com,
where teachers will be able to watch videos of other teachers using
research-based practices, download lesson plans and other classroom
tools, and seek advice from online mentors.

Scholastic will sell the training sessions and access to the Web
site for $399 per teacher, what Ms. Mayer estimates it costs to send a
teacher to a two-day seminar.

Pearson is taking a slightly different approach. It signed a $44.5
million contract last year to provide professional development for the
737,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District. The New York
City-based division of the publishing conglomerate set up a computer
laboratory where it does some of the training. Pearson also conducts
sessions in schools and at other Los Angeles sites.

The primary goal is to prepare the district's teachers to use the
Waterford Early Reading Program, a Pearson product. More than 5,000
teachers and administrators have been trained to use the reading
program, according to Joan Mezori, the coordinator of the Los Angeles
district's standards-based-promotion programs.

"We're really pleased with the service," she said.

At the company's computer center, teachers engage in a variety of
learning experiences. Through Pearson's investment in LessonLab, a
professional-development company started by James Stigler, a well-known
expert on teaching practices at the University of California, Los
Angeles, teachers observe videotapes of other teachers' lessons and
figure out ways to adopt their successful strategies.

'Specific Stuff'

While Scholastic and Pearson have focused on professional
development in reading, other companies are concentrating on
mathematics.

Educators' Professional Development/McGraw-Hill recently announced
an online-learning program for K-8 teachers intended to help them
incorporate algebraic principles into their instruction. The project
responds to new policies aimed at enrolling all 8th graders in algebra,
a subject most U.S. students traditionally haven't tackled until high
school.

The learning experiences aren't necessarily aligned with the
imprints of the McGraw-Hill publishing line.

By contrast, publishers of math and science materials that require
new approaches to teaching, such as science experiments for which
students set out to prove a scientific principle rather than follow a
teacher's directions to a preordained finish, are aggressively offering
professional development when a district purchases its textbooks.

Because those materials force teachers to abandon their familiar
practices and adopt ones that challenge students to explore the
subjects' concepts in a deeper way than ever before, districts are
pleading for help from those publishers.

"We have enough experience over the past 30 or 40 years to know that
innovative materials require retraining—if you want to call it
that," said Harold Pratt, the president of the National Science
Teachers Association and an education consultant based in Littleton,
Colo. "This should be very much part of the scene."

"I want teachers to have professional development on how to use
those materials," said Diane J. Briars, the senior program officer for
mathematics and science education for the 40,000-student Pittsburgh
public schools. "I don't want generic professional development. I want
specific stuff."

Here to Stay

With the push for standards-based school improvement intensifying,
publishers say their entry into professional development is
permanent.

What's more, the need for high-quality professional development only
will increase as states begin to implement the "No Child Left Behind"
Act of 2001, they say.

The federal law requires states to show consistent progress in
meeting goals for student proficiency in reading and math. It also
calls for schools to have a "highly qualified" teacher in every
classroom.

"If [the law] is fully implemented and catches on and grows," said
Elwood "Buzz" Ellis, the president of McGraw-Hill Education, "it will
have a major impact. A lot of states will be increasing funding" for
professional development.

Meanwhile, publishers may find some competition from unlikely
sources: their customers.

Some California districts are banding together and seeking the state
board of education's approval to act as professional- development
providers using state money—pitting them against publishers. The
University of California system also is competing for the money.

"It's unclear that [publishers] will be able to get a large portion
of the available work," said Terry Emmitt, the administrator of the
reading/language arts leadership office at the California education
department. "There are a lot of people who want a piece of this
pie."

Mr. Jovanovich is confident that professional development, though
unlikely to supplant textbooks as the most profitable sector of his
business, will be an area of steady growth for Pearson.

"The demand for really practical, targeted professional
development," he said, "is going to increase pretty dramatically."

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